"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Saturday, February 07, 2015

Saturday Science: Male Sexuality

No, it's not set in stone. Of course, anyone who has followed any of my comments on sexuality in general knows that I've never believed it was, but now there's even more evidence:

The story is different for men. The sexuality of straight men has long been understood by evolutionary biologists, and, subsequently, the general public, as subject to a visceral, nearly unstoppable impulse to reproduce with female partners. Consequently, when straight men do engage in same sex contact, these encounters are viewed as incompatible with the bio-evolutionary coding. It’s believed to signal an innate homosexual (or at least bisexual) orientation, and even just one known same-sex act can cast considerable doubt upon a man’s claim to heterosexuality.

Anyone who stops to think about it knows that a teenage boy is willing to screw anything with a hole -- an urge that is not limited to teenagers: how many instances have there been of male/male couplings (by otherwise heterosexual men) in prison or the armed forces? If nothing else, Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male gave us a couple of basic insights:

Parts of the Kinsey Reports regarding diversity in sexual orientations are frequently used to support the common estimate of 10% for homosexuality in the general population. However, the findings are not as absolute, and Kinsey himself avoided and disapproved of using terms like homosexual or heterosexual to describe individuals, asserting that sexuality is prone to change over time, and that sexual behavior can be understood both as physical contact as well as purely psychological phenomena (desire, sexual attraction, fantasy). Instead of three categories (heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual), a seven-point Kinsey scale system was used.

The reports also state that nearly 46% of the male subjects had "reacted" sexually to persons of both sexes in the course of their adult lives, and 37% had at least one homosexual experience. 11.6% of white males (ages 20–35) were given a rating of 3 (about equal heterosexual and homosexual experience/response) throughout their adult lives. The study also reported that 10% of American males surveyed were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55" (in the 5 to 6 range).

The key, of course, is that male sexuality, like female sexuality, is not an either/or proposition.

The other key factor is that Kinsey's research was based on behavior, not identity or ideas about "sexual orientation."

I almost hate to bring this point up -- it's too easy -- but I think that most of our thinking about sexual orientation and sexuality in general is shaped, like so many of our other attitudes, by the prevailing mode of thought in the West, our heritage from the dominance of Christianity. It's an either/or way of thinking, in which things must be black or white, with no room for grays. Unfortunately, as we are learning more and more, the universe doesn't work that way -- it's a place of grays, with few, if any, absolutes.

Think about the cultures of ancient Greece, ancient Ireland (there's an episode in The Cattle Raid of Cooley in which Cu Chulainn takes a male lover), ancient and medieval China and Japan, pre-colonial Africa -- there are too many examples of men finding companionship, let's call it, with other men, and, indeed, too many instances in which these relationships became institutions.

All of this while these men, for the most part, married and had children.

So, it seems that these new insights about male sexuality are not so new.


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